Paseo Ahumada Sequence

Many sequences in Chile: la memoria obstinada confront temporalities in provocative ways. Professor Ernesto Malbrán, who appeared in La batalla, reflects throughout the film on the nature of memory and argues that the dictatorship was not a definitive defeat for the left, but rather a temporary one. In another sequence, a youth band marches through the Paseo Ahumada, a commercial, pedestrian thoroughfare that symbolized Pinochet’s economic reforms of the 1980s, and plays “Venceremos” (“We shall Overcome”), the anthem of Popular Unity. Bystanders look on, stunned. Some applaud the gesture, while others clearly watch with disdain. As a final example—the list could go on an on—Guzmán returns to the National Stadium where he was detained in 1973;
a hand-held camera walks us through a doorway into the stadium such that we reencounter that space from Guzmán’s vantage point. By the end of the sequence, the camera shifts perspective: through the visors and combat gear of the police assigned to work a soccer game, Guzmán films a group of raucous youth who light fireworks and cheer on Colo-Colo. Many faces in the crowd are dark skinned. Eerily, we get the impression (which has been proven time and again) that today’s police and military are but one provocation away from brutalizing the people. We are left questioning how the violence and attitudes of the past linger into the present and still determine behavioral patterns.
Guzmán’s melancholic, personal cinema perhaps reaches its culmination in Salvador Allende.
Ruins—material objects from another time—give rise to the film. The opening sequence confronts the viewer with several of these: a presidential sash, Allende’s official Socialist Party identification card, and an eyeglass case bearing the initials S.A.G. (Salvador Allende Gossens). All of these objects serve as material touch points, in almost Proustian fashion, for Guzmán’s homage to his political father: Allende. As the film progresses, however, we come to understand that what we assume will be a reflection on Allende’s life and legacy, turns out to be, first and foremost, a film about Guzmán: “Salvador Allende,” he says toward the beginning of the film, “marked my life. I would not be who I am if he had not embodied the utopia of a freer, more just world that seized my country in those times [1970–1973]. I was there, an actor and a filmmaker. . . . Detained in the National Stadium, subjected to the machinery of forgetfulness that was being put into motion, only one desire motivated me: to save the reels of La batalla de Chile that contained the proof of the waking dream we lived with Allende.” (Fig .
2.1).
These first-person comments set the tone for everything that comes next. Other informants’ testimonies channel emotions and deep-seated questions that Guzmán probably harbors too. A nostalgia that seeks to restore the past intact, what Svetlana Boym calls “restorative nostalgia,” mixes poignantly with a more reflective brand of nostalgia that allows Guzmán, and those he interviews, to engage in a certain amount of historical revisionism that makes the film more than a predictable, romanticized evocation of utopia: Could we have done something different? Did Allende lead the country the way he should have? This tug of war between a desire to integrally restore the past and to openly debate what it was that really happened, in historical and existential terms, is perhaps the film’s richest contribution.
A final sequence in which poet Goznalo Millán reads from his famous work La ciudad (The City, 1979)—a book of poetry in which the lyric voice imagines history “in reverse,” as if the coup had never happened—speaks to a restoratively nostalgic impulse that risks dominating the film.
Yet final word we hear Millán speak is “Venceremos”: an ambiguous signifier within the semiotic web the film weaves. It both cites another (unrecoverable) time, but also acts as a call to arms, despite the odds. Cautiously optimistic, though melancholically so, it brings to mind John Beverley’s observation that revolution in Latin America “did not fail because of its internal contradictions—although there were many—nor was it condemned to defeat from the start; it was defeated by what turned out to be, in the end a stronger, more ruthless
enemy.”
By the time we reach Nostalgia de la luz, Guzmán, now seventy years old, continues his memory saga, but with new questions, new perspectives, and a slightly tempered, though still prevalent use of the first person. The reflection of a now-old man who has dedicated his life to struggle, his film is a beautiful personal essay on the intricate relationships between the cosmos and the events of recent Chilean history. Scientists search for other galaxies and seek the origins of human life, while mothers of the disappeared, in an equally taxing and ill-fated search, comb the Atacama Desert for shards of their deceased loved ones’ bones. At the same time, Guzmán seeks answers to the questions of his own life by looking in previously unexplored directions and by seeking alternative archives.
Tamara Lea Spira wonders whether Nostalgia de la luz “diagnose[s] a ceding of the political to the realm of metaphysics.” Unconvinced by this hypothesis, she seems to conclude that, instead of abandoning politics, the film redefines the political by constructing an archive that is much different than the one we find in the films I have mentioned until now. “The story of the dictatorship,” she writes, is no longer so tightly moored to a familiar affective economy of loss and longing.” Instead, familiar images of Chile’s trauma, like the bombing of La Moneda or Allende’s face, give way to the vast textures of the Atacama desert, whose history encompasses the longue durée: colonialism, the extermination of indigenous peoples, the plight of miners who worked in that region and were often brutally repressed, and the interrelatedness and evolution of life via the scientific inquiry that occurs there. The film, in this sense, manages to put Allende’s peaceful revolution and Pinochet’s authoritarian backlash into a much broader perspective: a desire that manifests through images of telescopes or swirling stars in far-off galaxies.